Many manufacturers and wholesalers cite efficiency as the key benefit to using the sales order feature. Sales orders let you shepherd a customer order from start to finish without resorting to written order forms or notepads. Sales orders also help to manage inventory — by using sales orders you can see how much of your inventory is committed to other customers.

• Turn the sales order into a work order for the plant floor.

• Transform the order into a purchase order to obtain products from an outside vendor.

• Create invoices from fulfilled — or partially fulfilled — sales orders.

• Customize the headings, fields, and columns.

• Create multiple invoices based on a sales order.

• Start with a blank sales order and fill in items already on your Items list, or enter new items as you write.

• Start with a memorized, partially filled-in sales order. Memorizing a sales order is useful if your sales orders often contain the same information.

• Track how many items are on order by your customers, and track which sales orders are still open or only partially fulfilled.

Sales orders track a lot of different information and use some specialized terms to do so.

Creating a new sales order is easy. But first you must enable the sales order feature in preferences:

• From the Edit menu, choose Preferences.
  
• Select Sales & Customers in the scroll box; then click the Company Preferences tab.
  
• Select Enable Sales Orders. This gives you the ability to display and fill out the sales order form.
  
• Click OK.

• Create a sales order.
  
  1. From the Customers menu, choose Create Sales Orders.
  2. Type the name of the customer or job.
  3. Enter the items the customer is ordering.
  4. Add sales tax, if necessary.
  5. Enter class information if you use class tracking in QuickBooks and want to track this sales order by subsidiary, group, etc.
  6. Click Print to print the sales order.

QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Edition lets you create invoices from both fulfilled and partially fulfilled sales orders. Let's examine creating an invoice from a fulfilled order first.

• To create an invoice from a fulfilled sales order.

  1. From the icon bar of the sales order window, click Create Invoice. The Create Invoice Based on Sales Order dialog box appears.

  2. Choose Create invoice for the entire sales order.
  3. Click OK.
  4. The invoice opens.
  5. The invoice is generated based on the sales order.

When you invoice your customer for the items that they've ordered on a sales order, they are marked as closed on the sales order. And when you have invoiced for all the items on a sales order, the sales order is stamped by QuickBooks as "Invoiced in Full."

Quick Tip: You can create more than one invoice based on a single sales order. You may want to do this if your customer wants to pay only for the items you currently have on hand. To create another invoice for a sales order, open the sales order and click Create Invoice again.

• Create an invoice for selected items from an open sales order.
  To invoice a customer for only selected items on the sales order, follow these steps:

  1. From the icon bar of the sales order window, click Create Invoice. The Create Invoice Based on Sales Order dialog box appears.

  2. Choose invoice for selected items.

  3. In the "Specify Invoice Quantities for Items on Sales Order" dialog box, enter the amount for each item or service for which you want to invoice your customer in the "To Invoice" column, then click OK.

  4. Click OK. The items or services that you selected from the sales order are now added to the invoice.